Having embraced the heritage of Half-Hanged Mary-and having, at seventy-seven, reached an age at which sardonic independent-mindedness is permissible, and even expected-Atwood is winningly game to play the role of the wise elder who might have a spell up her sleeve. The other dedicatee of “The Handmaid’s Tale” was Perry Miller, the scholar of American intellectual history Atwood studied under him at Harvard, in the early sixties, extending her knowledge of Puritanism well beyond fireside tales. She can now say anything: “The words boil out of me, / coil after coil of sinuous possibility. / The cosmos unravels from my mouth, / all fullness, all vacancy.” In 1985, Atwood made Webster one of two dedicatees of her best-known novel, “The Handmaid’s Tale,” a dystopian vision of the near future, in which the United States has become a fundamentalist theocracy, and the few women whose fertility has not been compromised by environmental pollution are forced into childbearing. a weedy farm in my own name, / and a surefire cure for warts.” Webster’s grim endurance at the end of the rope (“Most will have only one death. / I will have two.”) grants her a perverse kind of freedom. She once wrote a vivid narrative poem in the voice of Half-Hanged Mary-in Atwood’s telling, a sardonic, independent-minded crone who was targeted by neighbors “for having blue eyes and a sunburned skin . . . “So take your pick.”Ītwood made the artist’s pick: she chose the story. “On Monday, my grandmother would say Mary was her ancestor, and on Wednesday she would say she wasn’t,” Atwood said. The maiden name of Atwood’s grandmother was Webster, and the family tree can be traced back to John Webster, the fifth governor of Connecticut.

She dangled there all night, and in the morning, when they came to cut the body down, she was still alive.” Webster became known as Half-Hanged Mary.

“But it was before the age of drop hanging, and she didn’t die. “The townspeople didn’t like her, so they strung her up,” Atwood said recently. When Margaret Atwood was in her twenties, an aunt shared with her a family legend about a possible seventeenth-century forebear: Mary Webster, whose neighbors, in the Puritan town of Hadley, Massachusetts, had accused her of witchcraft.

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